I can't believe "old souls" could ever be serial killers. People who have lived many other lives have suffered and had intense relationships and are incapable of view others as mere objects. They have too much shared experience with the human race as a whole.
I would have to disagree strongly. First it assumes that age equals wisdom. This seems to be a popular conception but I personally don't consider it to be true. Sometimes it is, but old people are often more set in their ways, less likely to move forward and some are frankly bitter creul people. Progress is not implied by continued existence either. It's possible someone will live lifetime after lifetime with little change or little progress. Some people can have a wide variety of experiences, trials and tribulations, and yet still not learn from them. People who have suffered in life sometimes are inclined to behave similarly towards others, such as how abused people often become abusers themselves. Shared experiences with the human race doesn't imply making a person more empathetic with other human beings. Having numerous lifetimes of experience may just teach people how to manipulate others better. I consider it equally likely an "old" soul could be old and experienced in the art of creulty and brutality. A soul inclined towards sadism and maliciousness may, over the course of many lifetimes, perfect these behaviors to an art form. I also don't ascribe to the belief that everyone will change eventually, such as habitual criminals. Many serial killers and pyschopaths are also biologically insane and not in full control of their actions.
It's also possible for development to be uneven. Perhaps a person has lived many lives and developed compassion towards the poor or the disabled and devotes their life to helping them. What if it turns out however that this person is a religious fundamentalist who, in spite of their charitable attitude towards the poor, also ascribes to belief that women and blacks are sub-humans meant to be enslaved, that gays should be killed and favors wars of extermination against those of another faith. It's possible for a person to be kind, caring, deeply selfless and devoted to people like themselves, yet not think twice about acting the opposite to those outside their group. Perhaps then in their next life they'll be the opposite hated group, be charitable, selfless and devoted to that group, but have the same callousness and hatred towards another group of people, such as the group they were part of in the life before!
The concept of an old soul being morally superior doesn't take into account the circumstances of a particular lifetime. A person who under certain conditions may be a kind, caring person may under different conditions be just the opposite. Plenty of people claiming to be old souls, recalling "enlightened" lives back as far as Egypt or Atlantis, recall in recent times being slave owners, nazis, murderers etc. Almost makes me wonder if being a Nazi gives one a greater chance of recalling past lives next time, ironically. The old soul notion suggests that people are incapable of backsliding, reverting to older ways. Perhaps in earlier lives you had been a nasty person but over many lives in more tolerant or humane eras/cultures you improved. Now consider similar issues hidden long dormant re-emerge in a future era. Who's to say you won't make the same mistakes after not having been confronted with the issues for a long time. I recall lives in antiquity in which I was quite violent, brutal and militaristic. In other cultures over the next few centuries I did not fall into those patterns. Then as we approach the current era these issues and tendencies begin to re-emerge and have to be dealt with anew.
Here's a scenario if you can imagine it. I had read an Orwell essay in which he mentioned how history seemed to be moving backwards. Up until World War One society seemed to be progressing away from the mistakes of the past. Secularism, worker's rights, women's rights, ending slavery, faith in science and progress all seemed to be carrying us forward, away from the barbarisms that ruled us for centuries and millenia past. Then we hit the era of the World wars and we saw things re-emerge that had not be present for a long time. Leader worship, wars of conquest and extermination, enslavement of foreign peoples, torture, deportation and exile and SuperPowers, the new Empires. All this burst onto the world in just a short period of time. Even Helen Wambach observed, in her past life statistics, this violent turn around, with the 1800s being the least violent century in 4000 years, and the next century the most violent by a large majority. The World wars alone wiped out an amount of people equivalent to most of the Europe's population just a few centuries earlier. In the modern world we can see in just the past few years an enormous rise in fascism, religious fundamentalism and fanaticism and nationalism almost out of the blue. These things never went away, they were just not right in everyone's face.
